Field note 14 Favourite Roads
Ghost towns, perfect asphalt and nobody on it.
The road takes its number from 1849, the year the gold rush began. What is left along it are the towns that were thrown up for the prospectors and abandoned when the gold ran out.From Rodrigo's road archive
Favourite Roads
Ghost towns, perfect asphalt and nobody on it.
The road takes its number from 1849, the year the gold rush began. What is left along it are the towns that were thrown up for the prospectors and abandoned when the gold ran out.
- 1849The gold rush
- 1880sWhen it was over
- EmptyThe traffic
14.1Excellent asphalt, constant curves and almost no traffic. The happiness of riding a motorcycle.
14.2The gold rush began in 1849 and gave the road its number.
14.3Towns were thrown up to house the prospectors, and abandoned when the gold ran out.
14.4What is left are ghost towns along the road, kept much as they were.
14.5Fuel from pumps that have been there a long time.
14.6Doors like a western film, and coffee behind them.
14.7Forest, and the sense of being alone in it for miles.
14.8Nineteenth century California, still standing.The road takes its number from 1849, the year the gold rush began. What is left along it are the towns that were thrown up for the prospectors and abandoned when the gold ran out.
Simply spectacular, and almost nobody on it.
Excellent asphalt, constant curves, palpable history and virtually no traffic. I call it the happiness of riding a motorcycle, and it was one of my favourite roads of that first American ride.
Much of it runs through forest and empty country. In places it feels as though there is nothing but trees and animals for many kilometres in every direction.
What the road kept
History you can stop and touch.
Plenty of roads have a view. This one has a century and a half of boom and collapse standing at the roadside, and you can park outside it.Towns built for gold, and left behind by it.
1849 was the year the rush began, and thousands of settlements were improvised to house the prospectors drawn to the Golden State. By 1860 the fever was already fading, and twenty years later it was finished.
What survives are ghost towns along the banks of Route 49. You stop in one, fill up at a petrol station that has been there a very long time, and have a coffee behind doors straight out of a western.
The field archive
4 more frames from the road
Everything else from the folder, in the order it was taken.
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